Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to social media and location based services and is more particularly related to systems and methods for objectively determining one or more experts about specific venues/events. The present invention is also particularly related to systems and methods for objectively determining one or more experts about specific categories of venues/events within a specific geographic region at a particular scale on a map. The present invention is also particularly related to systems and methods for routing questions and answers about a venue/event or category of venue/event within a specific geographic region at a particular scale to and from an expert. The present invention is also particularly related to systems and methods for efficiently representing the location of a plurality of venues/events and/or users within a specific geographic region on a displayed map at a plurality of scales of the map.
Related Art
In conventional online systems, determining who is an expert about a specific venue/event or category of venue/event has historically been very subjective and problematic. These conventional online systems typically require potential experts to provide input regarding the venues/event and/or categories of venues/events they are knowledgeable about. However, the conventional online systems suffer from the autobiographical nature of the information that is used to determine who is an expert about a specific venue/event and/or category of venue/event. The conventional online systems are incapable of validating the autobiographical input from the potential experts and therefore the conventional online systems are unable to accurately determine who an expert is.
The vast majority of conventional online systems do not even attempt to identify an expert and instead merely allow users to post requests about a specific venue/event and/or category of venue/event and/or geographic region and hope that a true expert receives the posted request and timely responds to the posted request. This solution similarly suffers because the requesting user has no way to verify the experience of any potential expert who might receive the posted request and choose to respond. Thus, the alleged expertise of the potential expert who responds is based solely on the potential expert's own perception of her knowledge about the subject of the request. Other conventional solutions naively send a request to a large set of peer users hoping that a true expert peer user will respond to the request and provide an informed answer. This solution equally suffers from the same problems described above in addition to the inherently limited scale of a singular user's social network.
A further limitation of conventional systems is that they lack the ability to efficiently present graphical elements representing the location of a plurality of venues/events and/or users on a displayed map. This problem is particularly amplified when the scale of the map is altered to show a larger geographical area without correspondingly altering the size of the window/screen in which the map is displayed. Conventional solutions have attempted to fractionally overlay the graphical elements on top of each other so that each graphical element occupies some unique portion of the user interface and can thus be selected by a user, for example by hovering a mouse pointer over the unique portion occupied by the graphical element. These conventional solutions are cumbersome and inefficient and introduce significant challenges for users attempting to select individual graphical elements.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method that overcomes these significant problems found in the conventional systems as described above.